I was just gonna say this - having played some Halo yesterday with my nephew, the time you spend hiding from enemies so your shield can recover really feels like a full round Refresh action. The only thing to change would be allowing the player to move while refreshing (Full Round Action which allows them to move up to their base speed would be my guess).

Add a campaign quality that (significantly) reduces Refresh's rather low Vitality return and you're cooking with some real heat. Call it "Shields Up" to emphasise that it's for replicating games like Mass Effect or Halo where you can return your shields rapidly while not being shot. That or "Everyone gains Regeneration" as a campaign quality. I think the former is nicer though.

No. While I've no trouble with easy vitality regeneration -- ideally it would be an amount equal to your current class level's vitality + Con mod so everyone recharges at a similarly scaled rate -- I very specifically don't think wounds should be magically restored with a couple of refresh actions.

Add a campaign quality that (significantly) reduces Refresh's rather low Vitality return and you're cooking with some real heat. Call it "Shields Up" to emphasise that it's for replicating games like Mass Effect or Halo where you can return your shields rapidly while not being shot.

I might call it 'Get to Cover!' (or 'You are Hurt. Get to Cover!')

On the grounds that while it may have started with Halos shields, health regen produced gunfights that feel so much more like how they proceed in movies that everyone adopted it.

Maybe reduced vitality totals for everyone but if you can get behind a chest high wall and keep your head down you can use the refresh action to get lots of it back. (In video games, if you are behind cover and not popped out to shoot, you tend to be largely immune from attack from the cover direction.)

Er, not really viable because that presumes someone's gone ahead of you and dropped all those handy cover panels without which you're boned: the alterations to refresh need to exist independently of anything else. There's already the Fragile Hero quality that reduces vitality to half standard; having Refresh base the recovery rate on your current class level would autocorrect with that quality (a soldier would refresh 6 vitality because under FH they only get 6 per level).

Er, not really viable because that presumes someone's gone ahead of you and dropped all those handy cover panels without which you're boned

Well, in a putative setting where thinly veiled knock offs of Nathan Drake, Marcus Fenix and Soap MacTavish team up to fight crime, the world being littered with chest high walls is just going to be a setting convention, in the same way that whenever Jedi duel it will be on high up catwalks with no guard rails. Or a villain in a certain sort of spy game has an irresistible urge to build a secret lair in a volcano and outfit their guards with magenta jump suits.

Now you're bringing back memories of ME2 and the prison ship level where, because there is no good or logical reason for it to exist at all, the cover literally rises up out of the ground as you approach and vanishes back into it when you leave.

Now you're bringing back memories of ME2 and the prison ship level where, because there is no good or logical reason for it to exist at all, the cover literally rises up out of the ground as you approach and vanishes back into it when you leave.

I thought the idea on that level (and only that level) is because it's instant "create a defensible position" in case of riots. Guards can create strongpoints, and take cover from prisoner fire by having it, as you said, literally rise up out of the ground. That's what the design of that particular level made me think of, anyway.

I do agree with the general point you're making that too many games have chest high walls for the sake of the mechanics rather then any logical reason to have chest high walls.

I've had quite few giggles looking at SW:TOR map design and the constant need to include things for scoundrels and operatives to roll to/crouch behind. It's not masses of walls, but there is ussually some sort of outcrop hanging around anywhere split level floors/decks can't be easily justified. Their Gunslinger and Sniper counterparts can roll to those spots, but wisely carry around a portable shield generator they can drop anywhere to make a barricade they crouch behind.

Good shooter maps use big swaths of coverless space to give you something to (fearfully) consider crossing for the speed advantage. If you've chosen your moment well, the risk pays off. If you haven't... well, most of those games have a respawm point you'll be visiting shortly.

But again, its not a new rule so much as a mapping (or rich descriptive mode) issue.

I very specifically don't think wounds should be magically restored with a couple of refresh actions.

Missed this earlier, but it's a DC15 skill check to get 1/3 of 2d6 wounds back (per Crafty clarification in the FAQ thread) - or, to put it in terms of another spendable resource, 1 Spell Point. AD are a far rarer commodity then either option, and considering their other (infinitely better) uses, I can't think of more then one reason why someone would waste one on a single wound point. The single reason being "it's the end of the session, beats not spending them". Even then you may as well just boost your mend check to ensure success (if you have less then +14) because it's a less shitty way to spend your AD.

It is, and would be, the absolute worst way to spend an action die. It also flies in the face of their very name. Action Dice. 1 Wound healed != Action.

And the Final Battle takes place in the innards of a giant Death Machine with a mechanism that consists of hundreds of giant cogs, that form CHW as the cog teeth stick up in the air, but you have to get out of cover before you get sucked in to the bind between cogs.

*Since this is a video game, we should be tracking the games STC, or Start to Crate ratio:-

I do think it might be worth describing cover in computer game terms - as in this is the bonus you get if you are crouching behind a chest high wall, or if you are shooting around a corner or hiding behind a pillar or whatever, because those are probably situations gamers are going to be familiar with and may want to replicate.

Some supporting text is certainly necessary, and we can perhaps even go a wee bit further than that if the stars align correctly. Will keep it in mind.

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And if you can do something like the shoot - hide (health regen) - shoot cycle from Halo that would be awesome.

Given where we are with the alpha right now, I'm confident this is eminently doable with the new system. Seriously, like 1/10 of a step away, if not already there.

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And if you can do a G.I. Joe campaign book, consider doing a AAA video game book! Call of Duty and the rest are at least as much of a cultural influence as Saturday morning cartoons used to be.

The Saturday Morning Spycraft series was a little bit of an aberration, and certainly a product of Spycraft 2.0's shotgun approach to "modern." While G.I. Joe will forever remain a core inspiration for the modern rules set - if not Spycraft, which is more espionage than blockbuster action - the rest of that series definitely lives out on the fringe of the core game line, if not well beyond.

Call of Duty and its ilk... Definitely in line for Spycraft Third, though again, not in the core book. It's not the main focus of the game, but will be well supported as we dig into other topics.